Thursday, August 20, 2015

A couple of years ago I started growing my hair out. My friend and magic neighbor Wendy grows her hair out and donates it, and I thought that was a nice idea, so I decided to try it for myself. Plus I was sick of my shoulder-length bob and thought it would be fun to be able to have ponytails and Willie Nelson braids for a while. BIG MISTAKE. It's taking forever and I hate it because it's always in the way and it's hot and messy and it gets everywhere and makes me look like a polygamist.

So my friends and family have been making fun of me for a long time because I believe in the inevitability of Terminators, but as more and more devices have AI and start communicating with each other and making more and more of our decisions for us, I'm starting to look not so much crazy as prescient, and I want all of you to remember that when the singularity happens. Feel free to join me in my pessimism corner:

Did I tell you about how I ate a tomato sandwich, with a tomato from my own garden, on July 3rd this year? It was delicious and I was incredibly smug about it. Karma has repaid my smugness in the form of a mystery animal attacking and eating almost all of my tomatoes since then--I can never get to them before the varmint does, and I have had to cut off the bitten section of so many of them. The bites are too big for a worm and too small for a skunk. Maybe it's an escaped fighting rooster from across the street, or a guinea fowl. I'm very cross about it.

Why do zucchini plants stink? I picked my only zucchini to have survived so far for lunch the other day, and my hands smelled bad for the rest of the afternoon, even after multiple washes. This is a design flaw.

Last week as part of our reunion with John's family we went to Lagoon, a local amusement park. Because of heat, noise, crowds, and general theme park suckiness, Lagoon can sometimes feel like one of the worst places on earth you can choose to be. Somehow we've begun a tradition of going there as part of this reunion. I don't know how it started, but every year John and I and some of the other parents try to shut it down with ever less tact, and we are just making no progress. It's a mystery. But many of the kids are old enough that they can roam the park in packs of their own, and the parents don't have to be with them every waking moment while they ride endlessly on Bulgy the Whale. So it gets better every year, and our kids do like running around with their cousins. So I guess Lagoon is an okay place sometimes, with occasional highs and lows. The high was that some kind soul turned in our car keys which had fallen out of a giant hole in John's pocket. The low was when I was on the skyride and suddenly there was a splash of some kind of yellow-brown diarrhea on my shin, I can only assume/hope from a bird.

This has been a pretty negative post, full of complaints about hair and bad smells and bugs and humanity's doom, so I will leave you with a positive image:

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comments:

What IS that smell on zucchini plants? It's very subtle but persistent. You might need some new long hair tricks. I found one this summer -- a way of putting it up with only a ponytail holder. Very elegant and keeps you cool. I wore it every single day on vacation in Asia and was so I glad I'd learned it. (Then I came home and haven't worn it since.)

I've got a messy bun just about every day, except for the days it's in a french braid. Hmmph. I told my hairdresser that one of these days I was going to walk in and ask her to cut my hair like David Bowie, and I was only partly kidding.